It had been nine days since I’d been teleported to this world.

  I knew that because when I checked just now the streaming music app on my phone, freshly charged by solar power, it informed me I had twenty one days left to connect to the internet. If I didn’t, all the music I’d downloaded would be deleted.

  It was incredibly frustrating as I leaned again my tree I had spent the last few nights in. I missed the days of CD players and MP3s. No subscriptions services and actually owning the music you listened to. Just music that stayed where you put it instead of this streaming bullshit.

  About five of those days had been spent getting teleported, killing critters in a lake, wandering through a forest, killing a crazy evil tree boss lady, and then getting rescued by a horned dog and his crew before being dragged into town.

  Four days ago, I’d left that rural fantasy town and headed back into the wilderness.

  All things considered, it had been pretty easy going.

  I’d averaged about six to eight miles a day, depending on terrain, and I figured I was roughly 25 miles out from town at this point. I hadn’t seen another person since leaving.

  You’re probably reading this and thinking, Lloyd, are you insane?

  There are psychotic woodland creatures out there that bite off sensitive body parts. Have you figured out how to deal with that yet?

  The answer is no.

  No, I have not.

  Still kind of figuring that out.

  Basically, the first thing I did once I was out of sight of town was pull out the anti-critter device Garen had given me. I charged it with mana and kept walking.

  It worked exactly like he said it would.

  I walked for a few hours without being attacked at all. I saw several squirrels and rabbits, and I think even a deer at one point, but they all bolted the moment I got close. Whatever the device was doing, whether it was emitting some kind of frequency or just projecting strong anti attack vibes, it was doing its job. I remained completely untouched.

  After a while though, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Garen had said. That fighting these things was one of the best ways to build experience over time.

  I hated how much sense that made to my excel sheet trained brain. Now that I am at the point where it is literally thousands of experience points between levels

  Eventually, I let it die down.

  I kept it in my bag, checking it regularly. A low blue glow traced along small sections of the metal square, pulsing faintly. That was when I realized it wasn’t a single solid piece of metal like I’d first assumed. It had been assembled. Separate parts fit together with purpose.

  Interesting, if parts fit together seamlessly like that, I wonder if that’s where the enchantments are hidden. I don’t even know what an “Enchantment” even is, if it’s a written language, or a series of circles, or even crude stick figures acting out the magic. Will have to ask Garrin when I see him again.

  Anyways, I’d held the knobstick weapon as the device’s glow finally died.

  It hadn’t shut off all at once. The blue light thinned, faded along the seams, and then went dark like a breath leaving a body. I remembered waiting for something to happen. For the forest to change. For some kind of warning.

  Nothing did.

  Then something shrieked.

  The first squirrel came from the left, a blur of brown and teeth launching out of a tree like it had taken my presence personally. I’d reacted on instinct, swinging the knobstick too early. It clipped the thing instead of crushing it, sending it tumbling across the ground in a spray of leaves and rage.

  It came back at me immediately.

  I brought the knobstick down harder the second time. There was a dull crack. More felt than heard. The squirrel stopped moving.

  I remembered standing there afterward, breathing hard, staring at the body like it might get back up just to prove a point.

  It didn’t. Though I did get a notification that I had gotten 1 Exp.

  Then the second squirrel had hit me from behind.

  I’d yelped, spun, and flailed like an idiot. The knobstick connected mid leap but not cleanly. The squirrel slammed into my leg, claws digging in, teeth snapping close enough that my brain helpfully replayed some very specific memories. I’d kicked, stumbled, and finally smashed the damn thing against a tree trunk until it went limp.

  Another squirrel. Another 1 Exp.

  It kept going like that.

  Mostly it was it was squirrels, though I got several hares and once the raccoon-like thing I saw before. Sometimes one at a time. Sometimes two. Once, three had come at me in a staggered rush that felt coordinated in the most insulting way possible. I’d missed swings. I’d tripped over roots. I’d slipped on wet leaves and gone down hard more than once. The knobstick helped, but there was nothing graceful about it. This wasn’t skill. It was persistence and panic and refusing to die to woodland rodents.

  Thankfully with my new clothes and backpack I found was a little more secure and able to fight. My new guitar was strapped in on back and I was careful not to damage it as I fought.

  By the time I’d stopped to catch my breath, my arms had been aching and my hands numb from the vibrations of impact. There were scratches on my pants. Shallow cuts on my arms. Nothing serious. Still, every attack came with that spike of fear, that reminder that all it took was one bad angle.

  God I hated it.

  But they kept dying.

  And every time one rushed me, I got better. My swings tightened. I wasted less motion. I started keeping my back to trees without consciously deciding to. I learned how far they could jump. How fast they could change direction. Where to hit so it ended quicker.

  Finally, I’d had enough.

  I pulled the device back out and charged it full of mana again. The familiar blue glow spread across its seams, and just like that the forest backed off.

  With a sigh, I pulled up my status screen to see how much experience I’d actually gained.

  There were 33 more experience points than before.

  That was it.

  33.

  Each one of those damn things had only given me a single experience point as I hadn’t run into anything over level 1. I stared at the numbers on my status, letting the irritation settle in properly.

  Experience until next level {28} – 2,156 / 13,100

  Total Experience: 121,956

  I snorted.

  Those goblins in the dungeon had been worth 20-ish experience each. Per kill. Ephraim really had been doing me a favor dragging me there. What I’d just done in the woods was days of this same repetitive bullshit for barely a dent in the bar that in the dungeon was several minutes.

  Honestly, that was enough of that for a while.

  I walked for the rest of the day, charging the device back up each time it ran low. I kept an eye on it to make sure it still seemed to be working. I only stopped to rest, and once to eat one of my [Magic Berry]s.

  As the sun started to sink toward the horizon, I found a spot that felt good enough and decided to call it for the night.

  After thinking about it for a bit, I decided I really didn’t want to sleep on the ground. So I awkwardly climbed a tree and, using the rope and sleeping sack thing I’d picked up, made myself a hammock.

  As hammocks go, it was a pretty decent one if you happened to be the size of an eight-year-old. The way I had to tie the rope shortened the whole setup, turning the bedroll into something hammock adjacent rather than a proper one. Still, I made it work.

  It made for an uncomfortable… actually, mid comfortable night’s sleep.

  I made sure the guitar was secured. I left the critter device on, and drifted off staring at the screensaver that passed for a night sky here. I woke up once in the middle of the night just to recharge it. Other than that, nothing bothered me.

  Once the sun was up, I packed everything, climbed down from the tree, and continued on in the direction I’d been heading.

  After a while, I started zigzagging. Changing directions randomly. Even backtracking a few times. When I came across a road, I made sure not to make it obvious which way I went, or even exactly where I left it.

  The reason was simple. I’d been warned more than once that being a [Bard] made me a target. I’d just walked through town, and there had been a lot of eyes on me. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I’d rather not make it easy for someone to kill me in my sleep.

  Eventually, after I’d gone far enough and found the spot that fit what I was looking for, I stopped and made myself comfortable.

  That was when I finally started my real reason for coming out here.

  Experimenting.

  This was what I wanted. Time and space to play with the abilities I had. To teach myself what I could do with the guitar I’d picked up.

  Which brings me to now.

  I looked down at my notebook, the page resting against my knee. I’d been writing while listening to music, scratching things out, circling ideas, half thinking and half feeling my way through it. The paper was already smudged, dirt worked into the edges, corners bent from being shoved in and out of my bag.

  Written on the page was my best attempt at capturing a song and its rhythm.

  Let's do the Time Warp again

  ba-da-ba-da-daaaaa!!!

  Stolen story; please report.

  I was listening to the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack. One of the many show tunes I happened to have downloaded on my phone before all of this. Say what you want, but I like show tunes. It’s not like the gays revoke your ace card for enjoying Broadway.

  With the time and space to think, I’d realized a few things while walking.

  The big one was that if I was actually going to lean into being a [Bard], then I was walking around with a ridiculous advantage. My phone was basically a treasure trove of music that didn’t exist in this world yet. In theory, every song I had would be brand new to anyone who heard it. And hopefully interesting enough that people would want to listen instead of immediately deciding to stab me.

  Ideally, music would make me less killable.

  That was the hope, at least.

  There were problems though. Two big ones.

  The first was my phone. The music on it wasn’t permanent. If I didn’t connect to the streaming service servers for 30 days, everything I’d downloaded would delete itself. And since I was fairly certain my service provider didn’t have coverage in another plane of existence, that meant I was on a clock. A literal countdown on how long I had access to my entire music library.

  The second problem was worse.

  I had no idea how to write music.

  Hence the notebook and “ba-da-ba-da” nonsense. Me trying to brute force memory and rhythm onto paper without any actual framework to do it properly. I knew how songs went. I could hear them perfectly in my head. Translating that into something repeatable was a whole different skill set.

  It didn’t help that half the page looked like I was repeatedly rewriting the McDonald’s jingle.

  I had basically been doing this for days, filling up the notebook with all kinds of music. Luckily, my taste was pretty eclectic, so I had a widespread to work with. Pop. Punk. K-Pop. Rock & Roll. And a lot of show tunes, obviously.

  As I wrote down the major sections of songs and albums, I started plucking at the guitar, trying to teach myself how to play. The first thing I figured out was how to tune it. There were small knobs at the top of the neck, and after some trial and error I worked out how to twist them until each string reached the right tone. I couldn’t have told you what note any of them actually were, but I could hear when they were wrong and when they weren’t.

  The second thing I learned was that picks mattered.

  I tried both the metal and wooden ones Garen had made. They were both usable, but I pretty quickly found I preferred the wood. The metal added a slightly tinny edge to the sound. Not bad exactly, just sharper than I wanted. I wasn’t entirely sure why it did that, but the difference was noticeable enough that I stuck with the wooden picks.

  As for how good I’d gotten, that part surprised me.

  If I had to guess, I’d say I’d made about as much progress as someone who’d spent six months with a guitar, not a handful of days all do to I suspected [Musical Resonant Frequency]. I still had no idea which string mapped to which actual note. A, B, F, whatever. That meant nothing to me. But I could pluck and approximate the songs I’d been listening to. Close enough that they felt recognizable, even if they weren’t clean.

  Once I hit that point, it became incredibly satisfying. Before that, it had been mostly frustration. Sore fingers. Wrong sounds. Starting over again and again. But once things clicked, even a little, it stopped feeling like work.

  “How’s my singing?” you might ask.

  Fine, I think.

  I seemed to be doing all right there, though my [Musical Resonant Frequency] ability didn’t help as much as I’d hoped. It let me understand when a note was wrong, and with enough experimentation I could correct it. But because I wasn’t using an external “tool”, it didn’t feel like the ability was speeding things up the same way it did with instruments.

  I could hear the mistake.

  I just couldn’t fix it instantly.

  My [Magic Mouth] at level 29 seemed to be helping me sing.

  I had more control over my tongue and lips. Finer movement. Better precision. It made adjusting my voice easier, even if it wasn’t a miracle fix.

  And speaking of [Magic Mouth], I’d been experimenting with it. I had found that-

  I felt [Influence Immunity] trigger.

  That familiar sensation hit. Like pebbles thrown against glass. Small impacts. Rejected. Sliding off instead of sinking in.

  My head snapped up in alarm.

  I started looking around.

  Then I heard it.

  “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

  Several voices. Slightly off from each other.

  My head snapped in that direction.

  I saw a rogue standing completely still, frozen in confusion. It was the same one I’d noticed back in town. Above his head, his class and level floated.

  [Rogue] {level 23}

  He looked like exactly what you’d expect a rogue to look like in a place like this. Simple leather armor, worn but maintained. A short sword held loosely in one hand, the blade angled down like he’d been mid step when the sound hit him. A belt loaded with small pouches. A dagger sheath on his off hip. Practical boots caked with dried mud.

  He had a half grown beard that looked like it had been trimmed once and then forgotten. Dark hair pulled back with a strip of leather, a few strands already working loose. His face still had that look of someone not quite hardened by age yet. Old enough to be dangerous. Young enough to still hesitate.

  Right now, he was staring down at the ground around him, clearly trying to figure out what had just spoken.

  The spot I’d picked was centered around a tree with a small clearing around it. Beyond that, thick bushes ringed the area, blocking sightlines and offering cover from every direction. From where he stood, all he could see were scattered rocks.

  On three of those rocks, faint and shimmering, floated three separate [Magic Mouth]s.

  They’d just finished saying hello.

  It was a trap.

  Like I’d said, I’d had a lot of time while walking to think. And one of the things I’d fixated on was aluminum. Specifically, how it was considered one of the most precious materials in this world.

  Digging through my memory, I’d realized that wasn’t unique. Back on Earth, if you went far enough back in time, aluminum had been incredibly rare there too. Hard to refine. Hard to extract in usable quantities. Napoleon had famously shown it off by serving meals with aluminum silverware, it had been a status symbol for only the very rich.

  It wasn’t until relatively recently that we’d figured out how to process it efficiently. Aluminum was everywhere, we just hadn’t known how to get at it. Once we did, it became one of the most common materials in existence.

  So while walking, I’d started experimenting.

  I tried casting [Magic Mouth] on random objects as I went, trying to anchor that strange floating mouth in place. I quickly learned I couldn’t do it without a material component. I had gold and silver on me, but even before testing it properly, I could tell they weren’t even close to what the spell wanted.

  The interesting part was that I could leave the spell half cast while I searched.

  Once I knew what I was looking for, I started to sense it. Aluminum. Tiny amounts of it in the ground. Incredibly small. But enough.

  Eventually, I found a spot with a large amount of concentration.

  Because aluminum was roughly 10? times more valuable than gold here, I only needed a very, very small amount. Probably the equivalent of a pinch of salt. That was enough to cast [Magic Mouth] once.

  I still hadn’t figured out how to extract it. I could only use it if it was already nearby. Once the spell completed, the aluminum seemed to just vanish.

  Using that, I’d set up several traps around the clearing.

  One of them was what I’d started thinking of as a detection trap. I cast [Magic Mouth] on stones placed around the perimeter, each one given a simple instruction.

  If it sensed something living pass by that wasn’t me, it would say one word.

  Hello.

  I slowly stood up, setting my things down on the ground, and pulled out my dagger named Mouthy in one hand and picked up the knobstick in the other.

  “Hello,” I said, cocking my head at the rogue.

  “Uh,” he said, taking an uncertain step forward.

  “Hello. Hello,” two more rocks on the ground chimed in as [Magic Mouth] appeared, triggering as he stepped fully into range.

  I’d learned a few things while casting these newer [Magic Mouth]s.

  The first was that, at its base form, the spell was very limited. You could really only give it one condition, something like sensing anything that wasn’t me, and then one response. A sound. A word. Some small action. That was it.

  To sum it up, it could sense something somehow, then do exactly one thing in response.

  Any words it spoke came out in my voice. I could try to have it imitate other voices, but the result was never convincing. I had a pretty clear image in my head of people I’d talked to recently when I cast some of these. Still, whatever the spell did, it just sounded like me doing a bad impression of someone else.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  “Uh,” he said again. This time he seemed to gather a bit more confidence. “What’s going on?”

  “Well,” I said, taking a step closer, “I’m guessing you came out here to kill me. Right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, confidence creeping into his voice as he took another step forward. This time, none of the trap[Magic Mouth]s triggered as he was past the outer edge now, though he glanced at the many rocks around his feet. “You had to know something was coming. I mean, you were a [Bard] all by yourself. Why don’t you just lay down and I’ll make this fast. There’s really nothing you can do. It’s pretty famous how weak your class is.”

  “Mmm,” I hummed, cocking my head. “How did you find me?”

  “Oh, it was pretty easy,” he said, almost excited now. “Well. Not super easy. I lost your trail a few times. You did that on purpose, didn’t you? But then I kept hearing music. Followed it for miles. Honestly, it was like you wanted me to find you.”

  Then he frowned, eyes narrowing. “Though… how did my [Hide Presence] ability not work? It’s level 27. You shouldn’t have been able to overcome it.”

  “A [Bard] has his ways,” I said lightly.

  I had no idea where that confidence was coming from. My heart was hammering so hard I was half convinced he could hear it. I could feel the moment stretching, snapping tight like a drawn string. There was no more talking this out. Whatever happened next was going to happen fast.

  “Enough of your tricks, asshole,” he snarled.

  The snarl felt forced. Like he was playing a role he’d practiced before. Like this was how these things usually went for him.

  Then he charged.

  “Chorus,” I shouted.

  The world screamed.

  Voices exploded out of the clearing from every direction at once. High pitched. Low. Laughing. Shouting. Singing. Overlapping so badly it stopped being sound and turned into pressure. The air itself seemed to vibrate.

  And by dozens, I mean exactly 63.

  The rogue skidded to a stop, eyes wide, head snapping left and right as if he was trying to track each voice individually. His grip tightened on his sword. His confidence evaporated in an instant, replaced by raw confusion.

  There were rocks everywhere in my little clearing. Half buried. Moss covered. Easy to miss unless you knew what you were looking for. I’d found a lot aluminum here to work with, and I’d used every bit of it. I’d cast [Magic Mouth] again and again while preparing this place unit I ran out of aluminum, layering the perimeter with the movement traps and interior with misdirection traps.

  Each of the 63 misdirection traps had one job when I said the word “Chorus”.

  Scream.

  Not words. Not warnings. Just sound. Pure, overwhelming sound.

  I watched him stagger as the noise hit him full force. Watched him bring his hands up too late, like that would somehow help. This wasn’t an attack meant to kill him outright.

  This was meant to break his rhythm.

  He stumbled.

  His forward momentum carried him a half step too far, just enough to throw him off balance. I was already moving.

  I brought the knobstick up over my head and brought it down hard, catching him across the side of the skull. The impact echoed through my arms. He went down in a tangle of limbs, hitting the ground awkwardly as his short sword slipped from his grip and skidded away into the leaves.

  Even then, he almost saved it.

  Pure instinct. He slapped at my arm as he fell, catching the knobstick just right. It wrenched free and went flying out of my hand.

  I was already in motion with the other.

  I drove the dagger into his side, burying it deep into his gut where the leather armor didn’t quite meet. He screamed and rolled, the sound tearing out of him and blending into the ongoing wall of noise from the [Magic Mouth]s still screaming all around us.

  He kicked me hard in the chest. I went down on my back, breath exploding out of me in a useless gasp. He was yelling something. Threats, maybe. Pleas. I couldn’t hear a word of it.

  He clawed at the dagger, trying to pull it free.

  I locked eyes with him and reached out with my mind.

  Chew.

  The thought wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.

  He collapsed, screaming.

  I saw the dagger shudder. Subtle at first. Then sharper. Violent little movements I could feel more than see. Something working inside him.

  One of the things I’d discovered during my experiments was that my severely overcast [Magic Mouth] dagger was that it nothing like the base spell. The basic mouths were dumb. One instruction. One reaction.

  Mouthy wasn’t.

  He could hold multiple directions at once. Follow them. React to intent instead of waiting for perfectly phrased commands. I still hadn’t found a limit to how much he could juggle. I’d also learned I could guide him mentally from about twenty feet away, close enough to feel him respond.

  One of those instructions had been simple.

  If he was lodged in an enemy and I told him to chew, out loud or in my head, he would eat. Relentlessly.

  The rogue thrashed on the ground, hands slick with blood as he tried to rip the dagger free. Every time he got a solid grip, I saw the lips I hadn’t put there clamp down harder from inside him.

  Huh. I hadn’t taught him that.

  I got to my feet, walked over, and retrieved the knobstick. The screaming from the [Magic Mouth]s never let up. It pressed in from every direction, disorienting, overwhelming, turning the clearing into a nightmare of sound.

  I walked back toward him.

  He looked up at me, eyes wide now. Fear had burned through the anger, leaving only understanding. He knew how this ended.

  I brought the knobstick down.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  When the noise finally stopped and the pop up appeared, I stood there breathing hard, hands shaking, surrounded by screaming rocks and blood-soaked leaves.

  I stood there for a moment, breathing hard, and forced myself to look up.

  Not just at him. At everything.

  I scanned the treeline. The bushes. The rocks. Listened past the screaming mouths for anything else that didn’t belong. Any movement. Any second set of footsteps. Anything waiting to take advantage of the mess I’d just made.

  Nothing.

  Just the forest. Just the [Magic Mouth]s I’d created still screaming. Just me still standing.

  “Goddammit,” I muttered. “This world.”

  I let out a shaky breath and rubbed a hand across my face. I’d prepared for this. Overprepared, honestly. Traps. Noise. Layers on layers of paranoia. And somehow, despite all of it, I’d still nearly died.

  But I hadn’t.

  I’d thought it through. I’d used what I had. I’d adapted. And I was still here.

  Turns out all that preparation wasn’t wasted effort.

  Maybe I’m not that much of a useless [Bard] after all…